His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light.
His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement. His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple.
Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society" similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit."
My brother turned to me—"Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to speak for them."
Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought the chairman. With a tremor of excitement in my voice I said, "If you can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you."
Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question, shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We have a speaker for next Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and occupation?"
I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."
"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined up with the anarchists sure!"
That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.
All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend Chamberlin, The Listener of The Transcript filled his column with a long review of my heretical harangue.—With one leap I had reached the lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!